Darren Halstead on Unsplash
April Fools Donald Trump COVID 19
The first rumblings came in December. The president was warned in early January. He bobbed and weaved through February. He started to pay attention in March, long after Democrat governors and mayors around the country were responding appropriately. It was full blown hair on fire entering April for everyone but Republicans, (I’m not sure Trump’s hair is flammable).
They kept ignoring this threat and allowing the dreaded virus to infect at will. Half way through April, five governors still have not clamped down on this disease. The female governor of South Dakota, even today, says it’s up to the individual to take care of themselves like some stupid re-enactment of High Noon. And Florida’s hot shot governor, a Trump favourite, removed any ban on large crowds gathering in church, where of course they would presumably be protected from the demon virus by God. We’ll see.
It’s become an axiom.
Donald Trump could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it. Boring. Small potatoes. No big deal. We can do better.
How about being directly responsible for, I don’t know, 40K, 50K, 60,000 deaths? These are deaths that would not have occurred if he wasn’t such an incompetent, uncaring, retrograde jerk, who ignored repeated warnings from people with brains and experience that action had to be taken right now to mitigate this historic, monumental disaster.
He has been pre-occupied with his re-election and this damned pandemic is a very annoying stumbling block.
He was determined to reverse the prohibition of flavoured vaping but people kept hounding him about this virus.
"We just have to get the country back working again and right now", he offered. It was to be Easter Sunday but now it’s May One and COME ON eh!
And just in case, let’s be clear: the president is in charge of re-opening everything, not the Governors. OK, they were in charge for the closing but not the opening. It’s right there in the constitution, the one he’s never read.
Oh, this is bad enough…you think?
Governors do have power but so many of them are Trump MINI-MEs that it barely matters who is in charge. Republican governors, with a few notable exceptions, are not just mega stupid, they are lethal.
Oh yeah, the governor of Mississippi said they weren’t China; the governor of Alabama said they weren’t California; and the governor of South Dakota said they aren’t New York.
So, who are they?
So much for the geography lesson. Along with these proclamations are refusals to take sensible proscribed precautions in the face of the worst health catastrophe in over a century, even when their city’s mayors were begging them to take action. In some cases they have even prohibited mayors from implementing local restrictions.
But that’s nothing compared to Wisconsin. They are blessed with a Democrat governor who sensibly postponed a state election in the face of the virus and its inherent dangers.
The republican supreme court of Wisconsin OVERTURNED the ruling and forced masked Wisconsinites to line up six feet apart for hours and hours to vote in one of the most blatant episodes of voter suppression in history, in an effort to assure the re-election of another republican to their court.
IT DIDN’T WORK!
An aside: To demonstrate that voting was completely safe, the republican speaker of the house bravely stood out before the voters telling them how safe it was while being covered head to toe in protective gear. I can’t believe these people.
NOTE: Republican governors DeWine of Ohio and Hogan of Maryland have exercised proper precautions in their states to their credit.
We have watched idiotic, bordering on criminal, behavior by republicans in state governments, in the courts, in the senate, in this administration under the April Fool-in-Chief, who is becoming more bizarre by the day, and yet they keep being put back in office.
Hopefully that will change.
Elections have consequences, we are told, and the failure of America to properly deal with this pandemic is a republican failure, so maybe the fools won’t be fooling anybody after this.
Democrats care about people and we have seen that in great Democrat governors from California, Oregon, Washington, New York, New Jersey and more. Republicans care about people too, so long as they qualify – white, wealthy, male. They’re on the wrong side of history. Maybe this time there will be an accounting.
PS: Watch Obama’s complete endorsement of Biden to be reminded of what dignity, quality, empathy and leadership look like.